Junot Díaz

Junot Diaz portrait.
Copyright Nina Subin; used by permission.

“All societies are organized by silences that they need to maintain. I
think the role of art is to try to delineate, break, and introduce language
into some of these silences. I think more than anything I was just trying
to get people to acknowledge how much of what we call ‘Caribbean history
and culture’ is, in reality, one vast silence.”

Over the course of just three books, Junot Díaz has enchanted readers with
a unique prose style that blends Dominican and American street slang, pop
culture allusions, and gritty lyricism. Writing in the New York Times, critic Leah Hager Cohen warned, “His prose style
is so irresistible, so sheerly entertaining, it risks blinding readers to
its larger offerings.” And yet, in this exuberant, hybridized prose style,
Díaz finds a language perfectly suited to elucidating the often unspoken
struggles of Dominican immigrants as they grapple with racism, misogyny,
and poverty in their daily lives. Díaz’s work has enjoyed both popular and
critical success, consistently appearing on bestseller lists and earning
him several major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book
Critics Circle Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. A public intellectual,
Díaz has also been an outspoken advocate of a range of progressive
political causes and shaped a new generation of writers as both a fiction
editor at the Boston Review and a teacher of creative writing at
MIT, where he is currently the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing.
The formal inventiveness of Díaz’s writing and its engagement with the
devastating legacy of colonialism on the Caribbean diaspora have also
attracted significant scholarly attention, including 2012 symposium at
Stanford on “Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination.” We are delighted
to welcome Junot Díaz back to Stanford to deliver the 2017 Presidential
Lecture.

Born on December 31st, 1968, in Santo Domingo in the Dominican
Republic, Díaz was raised by his mother and grandparents in a poor,
working-class community. In 1974, Díaz, his mother, and siblings moved to
the United States to join his father, who had been working there for
several years. Díaz found the experience of immigration profoundly
dislocating: “I came to the U.S. at six and with a single flight I jumped
literally from one world to another, from one Age to another.” [2] Growing up in a working-class Dominican neighborhood in the industrial city
of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, Díaz found refuge in local libraries and
popular genre fiction, which provided a frame of reference for his
experience:

“I sought narratives that might bind together the two disparate sheaths
that were my life, that could suture my diasporic self together with any
kind of coherence, that could provide (if only through analogy and
metaphor) a frame for what I had experienced—if not the actual content of
what I had passed through, at least its surreal extremity. Those needed
narratives I found in ‘Malinowski’s triumvirate’—the genres of sf, fantasy,
and horror.” [3]

After graduating from high school, Díaz attended Kean College in Union, New
Jersey for a year before transferring to Rutgers University. While at
Rutgers, Díaz encountered a burgeoning Latino/a culture and a wave of
feminist writers of color, such as Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, and
Octavia Butler, all of whom would exert a strong influence on his
understanding of the role writing could play in giving voice to the
complicated interaction of race and gender at work in the world around him.

After graduating from Rutgers, Díaz, like many aspiring young writers,
sought to further his development as a writer by pursuing an MFA in
creative writing. Somewhat self-deprecatingly, Díaz has said, “I applied
blindly and not very widely. Six programs, and out of some strange pocket
of luck that the Universe reserves for total fools I got into one:
Cornell.” While at Cornell, Díaz struggled with what he has called the
“unbearable too-whiteness” of his writing seminars and workshops. [4] “Too white as in my workshop reproduced exactly the dominant culture’s
blind spots and assumptions around race and racism (and sexism and
heteronormativity, etc).” [5] Despite the shortcomings of his program, Díaz found solidarity in his
participation in an emerging Latino/a movement on campus that, among other
achievements, successfully pushed for the hiring of the first faculty
member of color in the MFA program, Helena Maria Viramontes. Just as he was
finishing his program at Cornell in 1995, Díaz learned that Story magazine had accepted his first short story, “Ysrael,” for publication. The
story introduces the character of Ramon de las Casas, also called Yunior,
the consciousness that narrates much of Díaz’s subsequent works. Sent to a campo outside Santo Domingo for the summer, Yunior and his
brother, Rafa, relieve their boredom by hatching a plan to unmask a local
boy named Ysrael, whose face was badly mangled when he was attacked by a
pig as an infant. (See excerpt.)
Told in Díaz’s indelible style, the story
introduces themes that will animate his later work—the pressure to conform
to dominant models of masculinity, the absence of fathers, and the young
man’s complicity in the very structures of oppression that constrain his
own life as a member of the Antillean diaspora.

Drown

In 1996, Díaz published his debut collection, Drown, a loosely
connected cycle of short stories chronicling the lives of young Dominican
immigrants from the poverty of their boyhoods to their attempts to find
love in the working class suburbs of New Jersey. Yunior, the young
Dominican boy with whom Díaz shares some biographical similarities,
narrates many but not all of the stories, providing an anchoring
consciousness for the collection. Díaz has said that “the arc in Drown is about the creation of a New Jersey immigrant Dominican
male subjectivity. The book is a how-to guide to how boys are assembled—one
specific boy, at least.” [6] Critics hailed the collection for its gritty, unsentimental depiction of
Dominican immigrant life and its distinctive linguistic style, mixing
Spanish phrases and American ghetto slang. Reviewing the collection in the Times Literary Supplement, Phyllis Richardson notes that the
stories “attest to his considerable gifts for conjuring disparate worlds
through a merging of languages—Spanish, English, Dominican slang, drug
jargon—to convey piercing images of loss and pain.” [7] In interviews, Díaz has characterized his refusal to provide any gloss or
translation of the Spanish phrases and Dominican slang as a deliberately
political choice, noting: “By keeping the Spanish as normative in a
predominantly English text, I wanted to remind readers of the fluidity of
languages, the mutability of languages. And to mark how steadily English is
transforming Spanish and Spanish is transforming English.” [8]

In the wake of the critical success of Drown, Díaz took up a
position teaching creative writing at Syracuse University, where he taught
from 1997 to 2002. Acutely aware of his own terrible experience as a person
of color in a writing program and the importance of his own critical and
commercial success, Díaz has aimed to be a positive force for social
justice. In addition to mentoring a new generation of writers in university
writing programs, with fellow writers Elmaz Abinader and Diem Jones, Díaz
also cofounded The Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) in 1999.
According to Díaz, VONA offers a place for writers of color “Where our
ideas, critiques, concerns, our craft and, above all, our experiences would be privileged rather than marginalized;
encouraged rather than ignored; discussed intelligently rather than
trivialized.” [9] In addition to his advocacy within the academy, Díaz has been active in
numerous progressive and leftist political causes, including the Dominican
Workers Party and the ProLibertad campaign to free Puerto Rican political
prisoners. As a public intellectual, Díaz often uses his status as a
well-known writer and academic to call attention to injustices not given
mainstream media coverage in the United States. More recently, Díaz has
been an outspoken advocate for the rights of Haitian immigrants in the
Dominican Republic, criticizing the government’s efforts to strip them of
citizenship.

Fukú Americanus

A self-described “crazy perfectionist” and “slow writer,” who often writes
dozens of pages for every one he keeps, Díaz took a decade to publish his
second book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. [10] While Drown limned the individual experience of the Dominican
diaspora, in Oscar Wao, Díaz dramatically expanded his scope to
explore the effects of the “fukú americanus,” “the Curse and the
Doom of the New World” on a Dominican family from the time of the Trujillo
dictatorship through their immigration to the United States. As Yunior, who
returns to narrate sections of novel, explains, the “fukú americanus” was unleashed when Columbus first landed on the
island of Hispaniola, resulting in a legacy of colonialism, slavery,
dictatorship, and poverty: “Santo Domingo might be fukú’s Kilometer Zero,
its port of entry, but we are all of us its children, whether we know it or
not.” [11] Loosely patterned on the comics series The Fantastic Four, Oscar Wao chronicles the effects of the fukú as they play
themselves out in the lives its four main characters, Oscar Wao, his sister
Lola, his mother Belicia Cabral, and his grandfather Abelard Cabral. With
his predilection for fantasy, comics, anime, and role-playing games, Oscar
Wao provides the novel with a language and narrative framework for
describing the effects of colonialism on the Dominican diaspora. (See excerpt.)
“You can read all of the literary fiction that you want, and never really
come close to approximating the horror of belonging to a society that was
basically de facto a genocide zone, a place where human beings were bred, a
place where human beings were enslaved,” Díaz has argued. “But you don’t
have to go very far in comic books, in science fiction, and fantasy to find
these sorts of concerns and these histories, not only on display but writ
large.” [12] A critical and commercial success, Oscar Wao, went on to win
multiple major awards, including the 2007 National Book Critics Circle
Award, the John Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize, and the 2008 Pulitzer
Prize.

This Is How You Lose Her

In the fall of 2012, Díaz was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for his
use of “vernacular dialogue and spare, unsentimental prose to draw readers
into the various and distinct worlds that immigrants must straddle.” [13] Shortly after he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, Díaz published This Is How You Lose Her, his second collection of short stories.
Like Drown, the stories in This Is How You Lose Her move
back and forth in time, exploring events in Yunior’s life from the death of
his brother from cancer through a series of failed love affairs that often
founder on his own infidelity. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Francine Prose criticized the repetitive
nature of the stories in which “Yunior cheats on the girlfriend he adores,
then tries to keep his infidelity secret until he is found out, abandoned,
and stricken with heartfelt grief and regret.” [14] Yet Yunior’s repeated infidelities, his almost compulsive lapses into the
self-destructive habits of what he calls “a typical Dominican man: a sucio,
an asshole,” shape the collection’s exploration of the personal costs of
the diaspora experience.[15] (See excerpt.)
As Díaz explained to Stanford Professor Paula Moya, “In my books,
I try to show how these oppressive paradigms work together with the social
reality of the characters to undermine the very dreams the characters have
for themselves…. [Y]ou get both the ugliness that comes out of showing how
people really are around issues like race and gender, but also a hidden
underlying counter-current that puts in front of you the very real, very
personal, consequences of these orientations.” [16] Like its predecessors, This Is How You LoseHer garnered
significant critical acclaim, winning the Andrew Carnegie Medal for
Excellence in Fiction and a finalist nomination for the National Book
Award.

Taken together, Díaz’s three major works—Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and This Is How You Lose Her—offer what José David Saldívar has called
“collective historias” of the consequences of the colonial experience on
the Latino/a diaspora. [17] Díaz’s characters may bear the scars of this diaspora experience, but they
also seek what he has called “decolonial love” through their often flawed,
and often failed, attempts to find love: “The kind of love that I was
interested in, that my characters long for intuitively, is the only kind of
love that could liberate them from that horrible legacy of colonial
violence.” [18] In so doing, Díaz’s work offers not only an account of the toll the
colonial experience has taken on the Caribbean diaspora, but also a
possible way forward.